Count Differently: Worry Less, Be Happier

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." — J.K. Galbraith, economist and presidential advisor

"These are dangerous times. The U.S. may be on the verge of making among the biggest and least necessary mistakes in world history. Yet astonishingly, many Republicans...enthusiastically desire a default." — Martin Wolf, for the conservative Financial Times 

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The United States of America is the preeminent and wealthiest nation in the world today. Even given all our troubles, there are millions around the world who would love to trade in our good fortune by migrating to our shores. The tremendous disparity in wealth, income, life expectancy and life outcomes behind these outstanding achievements of civilization may be well known to experts, but it's often obscured by the welter of historical statistics that make such assessments possible. 

But worry no more because we now have easy graphics for all that. This nifty series is from the National Geographic's The World of Seven Billion: Where and How We Live. 

What's amazing about this graphic is roughly how long these facts have been true. The same could be said of the U.S. at almost any point in the 20th Century, including during the Great Depression.

Indeed the contours of the map showing mainly Western "wealthy nations" has remained largely static relatively for much of our history as a nation.

Here's finance guru Barry Ritholtz's accounting of some of the GDP data using an economist chart for the past 1,000 or so years. Here's a graph of just the GDP (per capita) of the entire world during that time.

Here statistician Hans Rosling shows 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes for The Joy of Stats by BBC. Rosling's masterful augmented reality animation tells the story of world history in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers.

He's plotting life expectancy against income for these countries since 1810 and shows how the world is rapidly changing with living conditions improving dramatically around the globe. This is something to be justly celebrated as the tremendous human achievement that it is.

For many people, especially those living in the nations and economies of the developing world, these improving conditions are allowing millions to escape poverty,  hunger and disease for the first time in recorded history. 

Much of this rapid and recent human progress is now well known to economic historians, thanks in large part due to the prodigious work of R.W. Fogel and his colleagues and students, which garnered him a Nobel Prize in 1993.

Fogel's magisterial life's work is summarized in the short volume of lectures, "The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World" published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. Read it via Google Books and here via the book site. 

These discoveries in economic history were the work of more than two decades of interdisciplinary research by anthropologists, demographers, epidemiologists, medical historians and nutritionists and formed the foundations for research by the National Bureau for Economic Research Long-Term Factors in Economic Development and its Nutrition Project. 

Fogel's original finding — that "improvements in nutritional status may have accounted for as much as four-tenths of the decline in mortality rates but nearly all of this effect was concentrated in the reduction of infant mortality" — in 1984 led to a reorienting of research into the prospect of economic progress. 

Fogel confirmed that for most of our recent recorded history, life for almost everyone was indeed "nasty, brutish and short." In many societies of pre-industrial Europe, although famine was an ever present fear, malnutrition was endemic even in relatively advanced economies. This constrained economies such that there was a natural limitation to economic growth until the satisfaction for a basic human growth capacity was obtained early in the 20th Century for the mass of the populations of Europe.

Prior to 1900, human work capacity was often severely limited by absolute caloric restraints. Many societies, even relatively wealthy ones, could not manage to consistently supply the bulk of the population with enough food to eat to maintain proper health and nutrition. Illness and malnutrition thus constrained productivity, and this effect can be seen in the relationships between human physiology and longevity even in America.

The finding in one of Fogel's early NBER papers using a huge sample of Union Army veterans, (an early pension claims data set) is: "Among Union Army volunteers, one-quarter of men aged 20-24 and over half of men aged 35-39 were rejected as unfit to serve due to illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and hernias."

So slowly during the development of the economies of the western world, advances in health, productivity and technology have reinforced one another, and are now happily producing a virtuous cycle of unprecedented improvements in human welfare.

Since 1700, this has allowed a 50-fold increase in the average incomes for the people of the U.S., a doubling of our life span and an increase in our average body size by about 50 percent.

The latest of the series is The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 by Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong. The book's website is here.

There's several lectures available from Gresham College in London, (one of the oldest continuing educational endeavors in the English world) on this work online. Our Changing Bodies: The lessons of anthropometric history from the now Sir Roderick Floud, provost of the college, is the most general.

The more technical analysis and presentation is here by professor Bernard Harris.

So with all this wondrous human progress and economic advancement, not even the dolts and madmen in Washington might be able to soon reverse it all, right?

Well, this is where our founders in their wisdom required a well-informed public to know what our governments are up to and to be able to demand course corrections whenever the ship of state was about to hit the rocks. But this also requires some information that likely never makes it to the evening news. 

Much of the progress in life expectancy in the U.S. is stagnating due to an inefficient, unreformed and costly health care system. There's also the report Falling behind: Life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context, which shows the impact that limited health care access for many will have on the well being of our population.

There's the latest paper from the NBER — Inequality at Birth: Some Causes and Consequences — from Economics Professor Janet Currie on how environmental pollution and degraded early in utero environments lead to significantly lower birth weights in infants. This in turn likely leads to learning difficulties and other health problems in later life. These detrimental factors are weighing negatively on our collective health and welfare as a nation.  

I firmly believe as Lincoln said to Congress in 1862, "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth."

We are still the richest, most powerful nation on earth. For our founders' generation, we were born in a depression. We thrived as a nation at our founding due in no small part to the fact that good fortune and the politics of the day dictated that "incomes were more equally distributed in colonial America than in other places," and that colonial America was a much more egalitarian place than the U.S. is today.

As renowned historian John Steel Gordon reminded us in Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt, Alexander Hamilton, our first secretary of the Treasury, invented the concept of a manageable federal debt and deficit spending as a strategic instrument of national policy to address the crisis of his day.

It's been with us more or less ever since. It remains an important feature of almost every national economy on Earth. From that day to this, we have never deliberately defaulted on our national debt, which after all is accountable for past, not current spending.

The last three Republican presidents gave us ever increasing levels of debt. Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, balanced the budget inside of 4 years and produced a surplus soon afterwards.

In a now hyper-partisan atmosphere created by our severely broken, autocratic loving, "one dollar one vote" politics, perhaps the best we can do is to muddle through and do a simple debt extension, like all those other six dozen times that have occurred mostly more quietly throughout the past 50 years.

The fact that our benighted elites have dictated that they spend the last six months arguing over the complete nonsense of "whither the national debt" shows just how bankrupt our politics really is.